Security in a company is paramount these days, and Ottawa IT companies know this full well, which is why they recommend that their clients use audit logging in their company infrastructure. But what is audit logging?
What is it?
Audit logging is made up of two parts, auditing and logging. This is generally when Ottawa computer services responsible for the technological safety of a company put a few safeguards in place in the back-end of a system, but let’s look further.
Auditing
The first point, auditing is in effect, a digital audit trail that the Ottawa computer services can trace. When a user on your system logs in to the mainframe , visits a folder on the server, or changes anything, it leaves a digital audit footprint, and that’s what we mean by “auditing”. Every connection made on a network or computer can be tracked, traced, and stored. This brings us to our second point.
Logging
Knowing that a users actions can be traced is about as useful as an inflatable dartboard, if there’s no way to store it. Ottawa IT companies know this, and have come up with ways to store this data, or “log” it to a database. Having a digital database of logins, visits, and changes stored externally helps a great deal more than you would think. It is not only a store of immediate changes, but also of long-term changes (the length of which is decided upon between whichever Ottawa IT companies you choose to hire).
The Benefits
What are the benefits to storing and logging? Well, apart from the security benefits, where you can see who has been on the server, and who would be to blame if the mainframe was hacked, there’s another, more useful benefit that can be gained from auditing and logging, and that is history.
Being able to track and trace changes means not only that Ottawa computer services can see what has changed, but also what it used to be. If you or your employee accidentally removed a database entry, deleted a folder, or changed a core filename, you don’t need to worry, it can be reverted. Being able to jump back to a previous file version means not only is your current work safe, but your past work too. This is especially useful in the cases where there are claims of plagiarism, and you need to prove that the work your company has done, was unique and entirely yours.
